Mysterious Disappearing Bees

Brownish-orange bumps on the backs of these bees are Varroa jacobsoni mites, a possible cause of CCD. (Photo courtesy of the USDA)

Honeybees devouring a new, nutrient-rich food. Without the bees, about a third of the food we eat would not be pollinated. (Photo courtesy of the USDA)

Millions of honeybees across the country are dying
mysteriously. Entire hives or colonies of bees are
collapsing. Scientists say it’s some new threat. They’re scrambling to find answers.
As Bob Allen reports, bees are crucial in pollinating billions of dollars worth
of crops every spring:
http://environmentreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/allen_032607.mp3

Transcript

Millions of honeybees across the country are dying
mysteriously. Entire hives or colonies of bees are
collapsing. Scientists say it’s some new threat. They’re scrambling to find answers.
As Bob Allen reports, bees are crucial in pollinating billions of dollars worth
of crops every spring:

That fresh crisp apple you bite into for lunch comes from
a bee pollinating an apple blossom, but honeybees in the
U.S. are under tremendous stress. A new threat is
devastating them. It can wipe out entire colonies.

There’s plenty of honey still left in the hives to feed
the bees, but the bees have vanished. Scientists are
baffled. They’re calling it “Colony Collapse Disorder.”

Dennis van Englesdorp is bee inspector for the state of
Pennsylvania. He says the disorder first showed up in his
state last fall. But it’s now threatening the entire
beekeeping industry:

“We could not sustain the level of loss we’re seeing this
year several years in a row. And there are crops that are
90 to 100% reliant on honeybees for pollination. You need
bees for apples. And if you don’t have bees you don’t have
apples.”

A research team at Penn State University has given
themselves until fall to come up with some answers.

On a hilly farm in northern Michigan, Julius Kolarik raises
apples, cherries and honeybees. It’s a sunny day with the
temperature nudging near 50 degrees:

“So, no, it’s a beautiful day for bees. Makes you feel
good when you see bees flying. Makes me feel good
(laughs).”

This is the first time Kolarik has checked his bee yard
since fall. He uses his hive tool to pry the top off each
three-foot high colony to see how the bees are doing:

“We can see that they’re alive and that’s the main thing.”

It used to be considered an embarrassment if a beekeeper lost more
than 10% or so of his bees annually, but things have
gotten a lot tougher in recent years.

Parasitic mites have infested honeybees just about
everywhere. They’ve weakened the bees and left them
vulnerable to diseases and that’s meant annual losses
double what they used to be.

Now on top of that, there’s this new disorder. But Julius
Kolarik is not so sure how new it is. He’s been
raising honeybees since he was a kid:

“We’ve seen some of the same symptoms, so uh, through the
years. Even before we finally said that we have mites, uh.
We were getting unexplained losses. But now it’s come back
again. ‘Cause other years guys have lost whole yards but
left one or two hives.”

Bee researchers say previous outbreaks of colony collapse
were isolated incidents. This time it’s spread across the
country.

Tom McCormick’s small beekeeping operation supplies honey
to local markets in western Pennsylvania. That is, it did
until two years ago. That’s when he says collapsing
disorder killed half his colonies, so he bought more bees
to replace them. They did OK last year, but this spring
he’s looking at an 80% loss:

“To me it doesn’t make sense to go buy more bees and throw
them right back into the same situation without any idea
what the cause is.”

McCormick says two of his beekeeping friends have been
totally wiped out. And they’ve been seeing more than one
thing going on in their hives:

“One, we see hives full of honey and no bees. Totally
gone. We see other situations where we have a nice large
cluster of bees with honey all surrounding them and the
bees dead.”

When he reported this two years ago, he says, state
officials ignored him. Pennsylvania state beekeeper Dennis van Englesdorp admits
he thought McCormick had a serious mite problem at first.

But now researchers at Penn
State are checking other possible
environmental stresses that could be killing honeybees.
van Englesdorp says pinpointing the cause can be just
as difficult with bees as it is with humans:

“You can get a heart attack if you don’t eat well, if you
drink too much, if you smoke, you’re genetically disposed
to a heart attack. It could be one of those factors. It
could be a lot of those factors combining together.”

For this year, he says, the disorder means the number of honeybee colonies will be lower,
but he expects there to be enough to meet pollination
demands.